No No Man’s Sky Patch Notes: Performance Boost, Misc.

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If you’ve been pootling around the galaxy in No Man’s Sky [official site] – and Steam’s numbers say that, at its peak today, 47,500 of y’all were playing at the same time – you’ll likely have noticed two patches download over the past day or so. Hello Games haven’t yet got around to releasing notes detailing exactly what the patches change (probably busy, that lot, yeah?) but they have given a broad overview. Basically, the space exploration game should now run faster on slower PCs.

Hello Games co-founder Sean Murray gave the overview on Twitter yesterday:

No Man’s Sky may not be what everyone wants or expected but evidently a fair few players are digging it. I, at least, have enjoyed seeing Pip poke around, finding and sharing interesting sights. Some of the creatures she’s showing me are like ’70s Doctor Who monsters in the most wonderful way. I believe she’ll be sharing some of those with y’all soon.

Did you try the experimental branch before? All of the complaints I saw last night were from people on that branch complaining that it was having problems with their save files. Sadly, I’m not sure what you can do about that other than delete the save, which is less than ideal.

No, never touched it. I haven’t played it for a few days because I was waiting for a few patches to come out. When it updated last night I booted it up just to see how it performs and couldn’t get into the game.

Even the support-/issue-related tweets sound like Molyneux at this point. “Wow! Only 1 percent! That’s still EIGHTEEN QUNTILLION people! But wow! We’re still gonna resolve se-ven-ty percent of that right! now!”

The odds don’t add up, that’s for sure. The second star system I visited was already found and named by someone else, along with one of the planets (but not all of them).

There are too many reports of this kind of thing for there not to be something screwy going on with the RNG for starting locations. They’re either intentionally forcing this, so players see a more “alive” universe with other players, or the algorithm isn’t working as designed.

POSSIBLE SPOILER DEPENDING ON YOUR MINDSET:
The 18 quinoablobblabillion is the number they used for planets, the planets are divided over star systems.
It’s still an unimaginable number even if divided by two or three (or whatever is the average number of planets per star). Then those star systems are divided over an unknown number of NG+ galaxies.
Everybody starts in Euclid and a distance away from the core, combined with the birthday paradox and players exploring multiple star systems each, running across others discoveries might not be as impossible as it seems when first hearing about the 18 quentintarantinos.

True. If viewed as a collision problem, the math’s trivial. Let’s assume, for example, that the starting galaxy has about 100 billion stars (a conservative estimate of the size of the Milky way). Assuming perfectly random distribution, and looking at only the starting point for each player, a collision (two players beginning their game at the same system) becomes a practical certainty at about the 2 million players mark. However, players explore multiple systems, and the distribution is far from random, as they converge to the center of the galaxy – so encountering explored systems would be considerably less rare than that.

Yeah, the stuff about “only 1% of the playerbase raised support issues” sounds awful, since it’s a useless statistic. There’s a lot of people having trouble with the game’s performance, but who saw that others had the same issues, so they didnt’ feel the need to drown the game’s developers in support tickets for things that others had reported before.

But it wouldn’t be a 99% hit rate, for every one that goes to the effort of raising a support ticket there’ll be a couple who rage on Reddit and a bunch more that’ll quit the game and come back (or not) if a patch fixes their issue.

You’re right, but the way it’s written feels like a slightly desperate PR grab. If you’re someone experiencing issues, that’s maddening. Much better to note quote figures at all. Most devs don’t and for this reason I suspect.

Hello games needs to hire someone that actually knows something about PR, or just hit Sean Murray about the face with a dead fish.

Same. And I don’t consider FPS hitching and CTDs to be the only “performance issues” of note. You could fix all the major technical issues and I’m still left with a game that – while colorful and pretty – actually looks really rough given the way it scales resolution. The AA options don’t seem to affect a damn thing.

I’m running this on a PC that can run id Tech 6 games at ultra settings, and yet NMS on my machine actually looks worse than the PS4 version my brother is playing.

Reminds me of the patch notes for ARK Survival Evolved, where they reduced loading times by 75%, then another 40%, and the reality was it loaded in 50 seconds instead of 55. And all those massive optimizations which collectively accounted for <1 fps.

I recently had a spell with Dragon Age: Inquisition. The game played fluidly and I had no problems with upping some of the settings. Only having a 1080 monitor suits me.

However, the time taken from game start to character control was almost 3 minutes. Coupled with the fact that the Origin client has the slowest startup compared to Steam or Uplay makes starting/continuing a tea-making experience.

I assume the “retail” patch is just the two main experimental builds that were pushed out. They significantly improved my performance, but I still have to lower the resolution on my laptop to run in the 20-30 fps range.

For reference: I have a fairly old (by current standards) Nvidia 470M with 3GB and an i7-3610QM @ 2.30GHz. NMS won’t run at native 1920×1080 rez faster than about 17 fps with reasonable settings. And even if you turn everything down to “low” and turn of AA/anisotropic filtering, it only runs in the 30s. (And looks terrrrrrible.)

there isnt a gazillion worlds. its worlds visited (read ‘generated’) by players so far. and you can even generate worlds in single player and upload to server for points (read as post online to share)…

Maybe not quite the enormous game they claimed then. There are quite a few players reporting similar.

I think there’s something not quite right going on under the hood of this game to be honest. Too many players finding explored systems off the bat, the fact that two players “found” each other within 24 hours of the game launching, too many similar creatures and planets cropping up… Then again, I don’t own the game so take my opinion with the usual pinch of salt.

There can only be one generation procedure and seed, so that each player generates a growing subset of the common total set of potential worlds. Each of these worlds will have a unique ID as part of the generation process. When data is uploaded, it simply fills in a database entry for that planet’s ID.

When anyone reaches a new planet (i.e. newly generated on their PC), the game checks its ID against the database: if there is already data there, it shows it as already named. Likewise with plants, animals, etc. That would also explain why players never actually meet; there is no multiplayer code, simply a common ‘name’ database that is steadily being appended.

Talk about an oblivious in denial idiot. “Less than 1% have these problems but were going to resolve 70% of them anyway.” In other news “95% of players have problems with the 90% of the games content we promised, then cut, then played off like we never promised, we’ve resolved… 0% of those, but we MAY have Paid DLC which we said we wouldn’t have and that MAY restore a small portion of what we promised. Derp de derp.” Sean Murray, I honestly and whole heartedly mean this, with the deepest sincerity possible. Shut the hell up, go to hell and never ever come back here. And take Mr. Molynuex with you, you two were f**king made for each other.

Steam still shows off a trailer of non existing features and graphics on its store page.
Considering the lack of functionalities compared to what is still shown for promotion, I really wish somebody would shove a lawsuit far far all the way through were he sun never shines.

I find it amazing how the majority of comments regarding the character and public persona of Mr. Murray are, at best critical and, at worst, vitriolic bordering on murderous…and yet, without exception all of you live in a land (on any inhabited continent) where those who purport to govern and serve the public are, without doubt, most guilty of duplicity, false promises, lies, corruption, with a self-serving attitude that is national if not global and will, at every turn, lambast their opposite number, not to increase their public-standing but to lower that of the recipient of their political bile.

Compared to f*cking the public over daily and getting away with it on a planetary scale, poor optimisation in a game title and a few misleading quotes from a software designer seem infinitely pale in comparison. The code of Mr Murray only affects your free-time entertainment; the behaviour of your elected officials affects every waking day of your life.